Despite wartime devastation and more than 40 years of Soviet suppression of its German history, East Prussia is still present in the landscape of the Kaliningrad region, Russia’s exclave on the Baltic coast.
Old Catholic and Lutheran churches, as well as the castles of Teutonic knights dot this territory, which was incorporated into the USSR in the aftermath of World War II. In 2010, 100 of these buildings, in various stages of repair, were transferred en masse to the Russian Orthodox Church, raising questions about the complicated attitude to the past in a region where, in comparison to the rest of Russia, the Orthodox Church's roots are shallow.
History doesn't start in 1945
Present-day Kaliningrad Oblast was previously part of the German province of East Prussia. While the German population either fled or was deported between 1945 and 1948, in 1946, Kaliningrad, or Königsberg as it was known previously, was incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic of the USSR.
